As the year comes to an end and Fightlinker continues to chug along, I’ve been putting a lot of thought into the future of the site and how it will continue to grow and change. Recently we’ve gotten on board with advertisers who are awesome enough not to mind our potty mouths and actually pay a reasonable amount for our traffic. That means now I’m able to concentrate on growing that traffic, rather than jumping through hoops trying to keep the business alive through dozens of hokey schemes.

As for how we’re going to grow traffic, we had some options in front of us. We could cut up stories so every post requires clicking on a read more thing (eugh) or changing the front page layout so each story needs to be clicked on to read (double ugh). We could turn up the amount of longwinded unneccessary crap on the front page. There’s tons of shifty things we could do to increase traffics with tricks. But what I’d like to try and do with your help is this:

For a long time now I’ve been collecting way more post-worthy content than I’m capable of putting up. A lot of this has to do with time constraints – I can only do so much in a day. Another part had to do with the fact that a lot of content didn’t quite fit into the daily flow of the website. Perhaps there were already too many videos that day, so let’s not bother with this Dana vBlog or this UFC promo commercial. Or maybe one hot picture of Carina Damm’s ass just didn’t feel like enough to warrant it’s own post. There’s a dozen reasons why a lot of great postable stuff and ideas I have don’t go up, and in the end it sucks because I keep feeling like Fightlinker could feature it all if things were a bit more organized.

So let me lay out for you how I see Fightlinker growing next year: I want to make the Spank Tank, JackalTV, and Farts their own ‘sub-pages’. They will be run by jackals and consist of content they and I find, and the really sweet stuff from there will make it onto the front page while the sub-pages will offer a much more complete experience.

For example, while the spank tank would get repped on the front page whenever we do a pictoral feature for a specific female fighter or ring girl, the sub page will have a collection of all the tits n ass going on in MMA that day, from octogirl tweeting sexypics to naked models covering their boobs with MMA gloves. In essence, it will finally become the all-encompasing tank from which you derive your mma spank.

The goal will be to make these pages into web-entities in their own right. Some people may not love FL, but perhaps they’ll come check out the JackalTV page because it has all the youtube videos worth watching – ‘worth watching’ being the key here, not ‘every video we can find, no matter how painfully boring it is to watch’ like some other websites.

So I’m looking for jackals who are interested in helping me bring this to fruition. The immediate plan over the next three months is to test out the whole project and see what the response is from readers and how traffic is affected by the addition. If this whole thing is a success then it may lead down the path to contributors eventually getting a few bucks fortheir work. I don’t wanna get anyone’s hopes too high up right now as ad network money is still quite dismal, but I did want to mention the potential for this in the future.

So in summary: I will continue to post the majority of the stuff going on the main page. This isn’t a plan to lower the amount of writing I do for the site. It will only allow me to guide the creation of more awesome content in areas I haven’t had the time to develop in the past and expand the kind of site Fightlinker is. We’re already pretty up there offering our standard pissy take on MMA news, and now i’d like to bing on people to help do more:

Make the spank tank the definitive repository for all MMA things spankable.

Turn JackalTV into a place where you know you can see all the must see MMA videos of the week from a 3-second knockout in Turkey to the latest Tim Sylvia fight to the UFC’s latest advert for another event.

Build the Farts page into a repository for hilarious gifs, amazing fight photos, and tons of other random stuff.

If things go well there may be other page additions in the future – this idea came about from my frustration with the limits of Fightlinker as a single blog. So now if we get a few awesome sub-blogs up I’d love to expand this idea to include sub-blogs on women’s mma, straight up jiu jitsu / grappling etc, and who knows what else.

So if you’re interested in helping out with this, post in here and I’ll get in touch with you in the next few days with details and a few tests to see how you’d fit.

edit: being a librarian I am much better at things like tracking down relevant data and spewing it out in some organized meaningful way than i am at say….finding booty gifs and reverse gogoplatas from eastern european shows

1) Did Ryan just coin the phrase “sub-blog”? That’s like saying “blind mute”. 2) I would love to help although it would be limited to working @ night since I have a real job. 3) I just made chocolate covered cherry Jell-O shots for my department’s Secret Santa gift exchange tomorrow. THAT is the kind of boss/co-worker I am!!